It was September 1998 in Bloomington, Indiana. A group of
concerned citizens was gathered in the basement of St. Paul
Catholic Center. They were thinking and talking about living
their ideals. Some had planted trees in Africa. Some described
ways they honor the indigenous spirit of a place, and their own
ancestors. One frustrated woman voiced the nagging worry of many.
"I want to do something, but what can I do? I'm just one
person, an average person. I can't have an impact. I live with
the despair of my own powerlessness. I can't bring myself to do
anything. The world is so screwed up, and I have so little power.
I feel so paralyzed."

I practically exploded.

Years before I had been stricken by a debilitating illness.
Perilymph fistula's symptoms are like those of multiple
sclerosis. On some days I was functional. On others, and I could
never predict when these days would strike, I was literally, not
metaphorically, paralyzed. I couldn't leave the house; I could
barely stand up. I had moved to Bloomington for grad school. I
knew no one in town. I couldn't get health care because I hadn't
enough money, and the Social Security Administration, against the
advice of its own physician and vocational advisers, denied my
claim.

That's why I imitated Mount Vesuvius when the participant
claimed that just one person, one average person, can't do
anything significant to make the world a better place, that the
only logical option was passivity, surrender, and despair.

I raised my hand and spoke. "I have an illness that
causes intermittent bouts of paralysis," I explained.
"And that paralysis has taught me something. It has taught
me that my protestations of my own powerlessness are bogus. Yes,
some days I can't move or see. But you know what? Some days I can
move. Some days I can see. And the difference between being able
to walk across the room and not being able to walk across the
room is epic.

"I commute to campus by foot along a railroad track. In
spring, I come across turtles who have gotten stuck. The track is
littered with the hollowing shells of turtles that couldn't
escape the rails. So I bend over, and I pick up the still-living
trapped turtles that I do find. I carry them to a wooded area and
let them go. For those turtles, that much power that I have is
enough.

"I'm just like those turtles. When I have been sick and
housebound for days, I wish someone - anyone - would talk to me.
To hear a human voice say my name, to be touched; that would mean
the world to me.

"One day an attack hit me while I was walking home from
campus. It was a snowy day. I struggled with each step, wobbled
and wove across the road. I must have looked like a drunk. One of
my neighbors, whom I had never met, stopped and asked if I was
okay. He drove me home.

"He didn't hand me the thousands of dollars I needed for
surgery. He didn't take me in and empty my puke bucket. He just
gave me one ride, one day. I am still grateful to him and touched
by his gesture.

"I'd lived in the neighborhood for years, and so far he
has been the only one to stop. The problem is not that we have so
little power. The problem is that we don't use the power that we
have."

WHY DO WE deny that power? Why do we not honor what we can do?

Part of the reason is that "virtue" is often defined
as something exclusive, like a Porsche or a perfect figure, that
only the rich and famous have access to. "Virtue" is
defined as so outside of normal human experience or ability that
you'd think, if you were doing it right, you'd know, because
camera crews and an awards committee would appear on your lawn.

I was once a Peace Corps volunteer. I also volunteered for the
Sisters of Charity, the order begun by Mother Teresa. When people
learn of these things, they sometimes act impressed. I am
understood to be a virtuous person.

I did go far away, and I did wear a foreign costume. But I
don't know that I was virtuous. I tried to be, but I was an
immature, inadequately trained girl in foreign countries with
obscenely unjust regimes and little to no avenues for progress.
My impact was limited.

To put myself through college, I worked as a nurse's aid. I
earned minimum wage. I wore a pink polyester uniform and I dealt
with the elderly and the dying, ignored people who went years
without seeing a loved one, who died alone. When I speak of this
job, I never impress anyone. I am not understood to be a virtuous
person. Rather, I am understood to be working class.

I loved this difficult, low-paid work not out of any
masochistic sense of personal elevation through suffering. I
loved it because I physically and emotionally touched people
every day, all day long; I made them comfortable; I made them
laugh; I challenged them; they rose to meet the challenges. In
return, patients shared with me the most precious commodity in
the universe: Their humanity.

THIS ESSAY IS not a protest against selfishness, which, well
done, can be a beautiful thing. There is nothing I envy, and
appreciate, so much as a life led with genuinely unconscious,
uncomplicated self-absorption. And I do not begrudge my fellow
travelers' enthusiasm for glamour; there's nothing I like more.
The right dress worn by the right starlet on Oscar night probably
does as much to feed the soul as a perfect haiku.

Rather, I'm protesting the fallacy that to be virtuous, one
must be on TV, or one must have just come from a meeting on how
to be a better person, but one can pass up every opportunity to
actually be a better person.

It's sad how sometimes "virtue celebrities"
intimidate us with their virtue résumés. We think, "Gee,
I'll never travel to Malaysia and close a sweatshop. I'm not
brave enough (or organized or articulate enough) to champion a
cause. I have to go to work every day, and I just don't have the
time or the gifts to be a virtuous person."

I go to a food bank every two weeks to get my food. I have no
car. Every week, I get a ride home from other food bank patrons.
These folks don't pause for a second to sigh, "Oh, problems
are so big, I'm so powerless. Will it really help anything if I
give you this ride?" They don't look around to make sure
someone is watching. They just, invisibly, do the right thing.

Sometimes we convince ourselves that the "unnoticed"
gestures of "insignificant" people mean nothing. It's
not enough to recycle our soda cans; we must Stop Global Warming
Now. Since we can't Stop Global Warming Now, we may as well not
recycle our soda cans. It's not enough to be our best selves; we
have to be Gandhi. And yet when we study the biographies of our
heroes, we learn that they spent years in preparation doing tiny,
decent things before one historical moment propelled them to
center stage.

Moments, as if animate, use the prepared to tilt empires.
Ironically, saints we worship today, heroes we admire, were often
ridiculed, tortured, or ignored in their own lifetimes. St. John
of the Cross gave the world the spiritual classic The Dark
Night of the Soul. It was inspired by his own experience of
being imprisoned by the members of his own religious order.
Before Solidarity, Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who
helped bring down communism, was a non-entity, a blue-collar
worker in an oft-ridiculed Eastern European backwater. He was
always active; one moment changed this man's otherwise
small-time, invisible activism into the kind of wedge that can
topple a giant.

BESIDES THE PRESSURE of virtue as an unattainable status
reserved for the elect, there may be another reason why people
don't live their ideals. It may be that many who do not live what
they believe have been stunted. They've been told many times:
"What you feel does not matter, what you believe is
ridiculous, what you envision is worthless; just sit back and
obey the priest, preacher, teacher, cop, mob, man in charge, or
your own fear." When the still, small voice whispers to them
that they ought to visit an elderly neighbor, write a letter to
the editor, or pull a few strings and let the indigent patient
see the doctor, they tell the still, small voice "Stifle
yourself!"

Such self-numbed people may see themselves as perpetual
victims. "I have nothing!" they insist. "I have no
power! I can't do anything! I have nothing to give! Everybody
picks on me!" These are the folks who begrudge so much as a
smile to their neighbors. Even as they live in houses, drive
cars, enjoy health, they see themselves as naked, starving,
homeless, penniless wretches waiting to be rescued by whomever is
in charge. Their sense of victimization does not allow them to
see that they are in charge - of their own choices.

While working or traveling in Africa, Asia, and Eastern
Europe, I occasionally met people who really did have next to
nothing, but who stunned me with their insistence on the
abundance of their own humanity. One afternoon, as I trekked to
my teaching post in the Himalayas, a monsoon storm turned day
into night and a landslide wiped out my trail. I got terribly
lost. Coming to a strange village, exhausted, I sat on the porch
of a peasant home. Inside, the family was eating roasted cow-corn
kernels for dinner. There was nothing else on their menu.

A man inside saw that a human form was sitting on his porch.
He couldn't have seen that I was American, or anything else, for
that matter. He whispered to his wife, "Someone is sitting
on our porch. We have to cook rice." Rice is the highest
status food in that economy. And by "rice" they meant
an elaborate meal of rice, lentils, and vegetables.

This feeling of being seen, this conviction that every act one
performs matters to a supremely consequential audience, can come
from a belief in God. Psalm 139 articulates how thoroughly
witnessed the theist feels:

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when
I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
...Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.
Where can I go from Your Spirit? Where can I flee from your
presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my
bed in the depths, you are there.

The very marrow of the believer's bones is impregnated with
the conviction that everything they do is witnessed by God, and
that everything they do matters to God. Whether or not one's
fellow beings see is secondary.

I SUSPECT THAT we all have our three-in-the-morning moments,
when all of life seems one no-exit film noir, where any effort is
pointless, where any hope seems to be born only to be dashed,
like a fallen nestling on a summer sidewalk. When I have those
moments, I remind myself: the ride in the snow; the volunteers at
the food bank; the Nepali peasants who fed me. Invisible, silent
people who, day by day, choice by choice, unseen by me, unknown
to me, force me to witness myself, invite me to keep making my
own best choices, and keep me living my ideals.

Danusha Veronica Goska, author of Love Me More
(Xlibris), had recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of
Indiana's folklore department when this article appeared. This
article is excerpted from The Impossible Will Take a Little
While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope In a Time of Fear, edited by
Paul Rogat Loeb (Basic Books 2004).

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